Create Perfect Referral ProgramS with Voucherify and Braze – A Quick Guide
Acquiring customers can be both vital and challenging for lots of businesses – especially those who rely mostly on new customers. Studies have shown that retaining regular customers is far less expensive and more effective than continuously finding new ones, but sometimes it’s a must. There is, however, a way to lower the costs (in a long shot) and shorten the time necessary to get new clients. It’s called referral marketing, and today I’m going to show you how to create a perfect referral program that can work wonders with just two tools – Voucherify and Braze.
This article is a quick guide – if you need a deeper understanding of referral programs, how they work and what you can achieve with them, follow our thorough guide to referral programs.
Creating a referral program seems to be way harder than it really is – at least for those who know which software they should use. Let’s start with telling you a bit about both Voucherify and Braze – if you’re familiar with either of them, feel free to skip this part.
Voucherify – how does it work?
Voucherify is an API-first Promotion Engine that you can use to build referral programs, loyalty programs, generate personalized coupons, cart-level promotions, and much more. Each campaign type can be tailored to your needs using the web dashboard or API.
With Voucherify, you can:
- Build complete single- or double-sided referral programs.
- Reward referrers (advocates) and referees (invited friends) with discount coupons, gift card credits or physical products.
- Create separate tiers for referrers based on the number of referrals they have.
- Use custom events and attributes to personalize your referral program to an even higher level.
Having a well-thought, powerful referral program, though, doesn’t mark the end of the effort needed to launch it – you also need a proper distribution. And that’s where Braze kicks in.
What is Braze?
Braze is a fully-featured Customer Relationship Management platform that offers high-end distribution features, such as automated in-app messages, email and push notifications. All these are meant to create meaningful customer experience, which leads to acquiring engaged and loyal customers.
Working together – Braze & Voucherify integration
The general rule of Braze & Voucherify integration is simple: you can build referral programs in Voucherify, generate codes, rewards and tiers, and then pass the vital information to Braze. From there, you can distribute the codes and other referral data (e.g. rewards for advocates or the total number of referrals) using Braze omnichannel messaging features.
There are actually three ways to integrate Voucherify with Braze:
- Connected Content
- Custom Attributes
- Custom API Integration
I’ll show you how to use each of these. Remember, though, that you need a valid Braze account and a Voucherify account – the latter can be just a free 30-day trial.
And if you want to know exactly how the Voucherify & Braze duo can work together, here’s a real-life example for you: a detailed look on how Pomelo (a fashion brand from Asia) made their promotions skyrocket with two described solutions: read it here!
Connected Content
The Connected Content method is fully API-based, which means that you can use Braze channels to distribute any data that can be acquired via API. In the Voucherify & Braze integration, Voucherify API shares the information with Braze, and with a simple code snippet, Braze can send a message containing any information pulled from Voucherify’s API.
What kind of information Braze can pull from Voucherify API?
- Unique referral code;
- Number of referred customers;
- The tier achieved by a referrer;
- Available rewards;
- The expiration date of the referral code;
- And much more.
To use Connected Content, you need to edit the body of your Braze message by adding the following piece of code:
{{CODE}}
{% connected_content
{{URL address of the selected API endpoint}}
:method get
:headers {
“X-App-Id”: “{{API key}}”,
“X-App-Token”: “{{Secret key}}"
}
:content_type application/json
:save {{variable}}
%}
{{ENDCODE}}
These four bolded fragments are variables you need to replace with valid information in order to get your integration up and running. The whole list of API calls you can use is available in Voucherify documentation.
For example, if you want to publish a code for the user – which means assigning the referral code to a referrer – you need to use the following piece of code:
{{CODE}}
{% connected_content
https://api.voucherify.io/v1/publications
:method post
:headers {
"X-App-Id": "VOUCHERIFY-APP-ID",
"X-App-Token": "VOUCHERIFY-APP-TOKEN"
}
:body campaign=CAMPAIGN_ID&customer={{${user_id}}}&channel=Braze
:content_type application/json
:save publication
%}
{{ENDCODE}}
Note that I changed the method from get to post and added a body campaign section. Don’t forget to include this short snippet – {{publication.voucher.code}} – it will make the actual information visible for message receivers.
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Custom Attributes
One of the best practices in using Braze and Voucherify integration is to use the Custom Attribute method, which allows you to store important information about your customers in Braze. To do so, add Braze as a distribution channel in the 6th step of creating your referral campaign and include a referral code there:
With Custom Attributes you will be able to share important properties between Braze and Voucherify, such as:
- Code of a published voucher;
- Publication date;
- Value of a published voucher;
- Customer cockpit URL.
Of course, that’s not the end of the list – all the possibilities can be accessed via Voucherify API.
All the fields you fill in the “fields mapping” section will then be passed to Braze, allowing you to use the information in Braze messaging by placing the attributes as liquid tags.
By using Custom Attributes to integrate Braze and Voucherify, you make sure that all the information you’ve decided to share between those two tools are fully synchronized – Custom Attributes save a lot of time and effort, because it allows Voucherify to recognize which referral codes belong to which customers.
To learn more about data synchronization and to get more detailed information about other tools that might help you in creating a perfect referral program, head on to Mike’s article: How to Fast-track a Referral Program with Voucherify, Segment, Braze, and Branch?
Custom API integration
The third integration method – a Custom API integration – is the best way to select the most crucial elements of both platforms and tailor them to the needs of your referral programs. It is possible thanks to well-documented, rich REST API provided by both Voucherify and Braze. Note, though, that such an approach requires a solid team of developers to work on the integration. Voucherify offers 10 SDKs for such occasions.
Takeaways
All three methods of integration have their advantages, but they share the same purpose: a possibility to create and launch a perfect referral program in a matter of hours. With the powers of Voucherify and Braze combined, you can have full control over your referral programs while being sure that all the notifications you’re eager to send out are going to reach their addressees the way you want them to – at a right time, with the right information.
With such a well-prepared, thought-out referral program you’ll be able to acquire new customers for your company easier, faster, and with much more engagement from your customers’ side.
Here are some useful resources before you start – check out the links below:
- Voucherify Help Center – Braze integration setup (covering all three integration methods)
- Braze documentation – Connected Content
- Voucherify API documentation
- Braze API documentation
{{CTA}}
Need a perfect referral program?
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